COIN vs. Big Army Debate on NPR
Article quotes SWC/SWJ stalwarts ( Hat tip to Menning)
Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within
“What I saw was an Army that was not as ready to fight this kind of war as it should have been, and so I came back from Iraq determined to help the Army learn how to fight this kind of war more effectively,” Nagl says.
He began helping write the Army’s counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.
….Col. Sean MacFarland was among the first to successfully apply counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq in 2006. And yet he was a co-author of the recent internal Army report suggesting that the Army is far too focused on counterinsurgency training. This singular focus, he writes, is weakening the Army.
The report cites field artillery as an example of an area that has suffered from inattention. Since 1775, artillery units have served as the backbone of the U.S. Army. But today, a stunning 90 percent of these units are unqualified to fire artillery accurately – the lowest level in history.
MacFarland declined to be interviewed for this story. But views like his have been amplified publicly by an iconoclastic, Berkeley-educated officer, Lt. Col. Gian Gentile.
“Due to five years in Iraq and six years in Afghanistan, I believe that the U.S. Army has become a counterinsurgency-only force,” Gentile said recently during a public lecture in Washington. He also declined to comment for this story.
Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army’s dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.
“The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us,” Gentile said during the lecture. “It’s almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war.”
May 7th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
The Military is NOT very good at change. If something threatens to change, the "old guard" gets all up in arms. Here is the truth. We fight the war we are in. We go to war with the Army we fought the last war with. Let’s look at the initial invasion of Iraq as an example. We went into Iraq just like we went into Kuwait. We waited too long to adjust our tactics and have been struggling in Iraq until the last 18 months were we have embraced counterinsurgency. I have personally used these tactics and know without doubt that they work and must be aggressively pursued.
There is a time and place for a fight. In the current environment, we are not fighting a war against a standing army therefore COIN is the tactic. However, if we were to go to war with North Korea, we will need that standing army. This brings me to support a proposal initiated by LTC John Nagl and that is the Combat Advisor Corps. 20,000 soldiers whose sole purpose in life is COIN and Combat Advisors (i.e. MiTT, ETT, NPT, etc). This would free up BCT’s to get their fight on when needed.
If were’ going to complain about the tactics, let’s do something about it. Let’s adapt a force we need.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Hi Chris,
.
You raised many good arguments and couple them with the ( what should be self-evident but isn’t) point of using the right tactics and strategy for the wars we are actually in right now rather than the ones some think we should be fighting at some other time and place.
.
The political sticking point is that U.S. military personnel are, per capita, relatively expensive and adding manpower represents permanent cuts in hardware acquisitions and reductions in contracts in the ratios that the services have agreed to amongst themselves. Naturally, the right thing to do is add manpower and cut a couple of multibillion dollar planes but getting that through the bureaucracy or Congress is immensely hard